Dead Meat (2 page)

I strolled over and slid onto the bench beside him. He glanced up at me, grinned briefly, and held out the half-filled bag of popcorn to me. I grabbed a handful and popped one into my mouth. “Hell, it’s stale,” I said.

“The birds seem to like it better stale,” he answered.

I threw the rest of my popcorn as far from the bench as I could. I was gratified to see the pigeons scramble stupidly away in pursuit.

“They’re filthy creatures, Vern,” I said to the old man. “They’ll shit all over your shoes.”

“It’s all relative, my friend,” he said mildly. “Pigeons are much like people, don’t you think? They’ll go wherever we toss the popcorn, and they’ll shit on anybody’s shoes to get there. Including the shoes of the man who’s handing out the popcorn.”

“Especially the shoes of the popcorn man,” I amended.

He smiled. “Well, anyhow, it’s about all we’ve got for wildlife around here.”

Anyone who didn’t know him would have mistaken Vernon Wheeler for another derelict enjoying the delicious comfort of a warm June afternoon with the pigeons. He was, in fact, the founder and owner of one of the world’s most successful industries and a man who could, if he chose, conduct his business from the office building he owned on Tremont Street or from one of his offices in Los Angeles, Denver, Antwerp, or Tokyo.

Those were the places he met with his bevies of corporate lawyers.

He preferred to meet with me, his personal legal adviser, on a bench in the Boston Public Garden.

Vern Wheeler was typical of my clientele. He was old, smart, eccentric, and rich. I’ve found that most rich people tend to be old, smart, and eccentric. I like them best when they’re all those things. In fact, I specialize in solving the legal problems of old, smart, eccentric, rich people. They rarely come to me for specialized expertise or courtroom savoir faire. When they do, I help them find it elsewhere than the office of Brady L. Coyne, Attorney-at-Law. Mostly they come to me because I offer a surprisingly rare commodity: discretion.

I am discreet as hell. I can’t help it. I can’t take credit for it. It’s my nature. It’s how I was raised. Or perhaps it’s in my cautious WASP genes. I am always surprised how old, smart, eccentric, rich people want to pay me lots of money for this accident of my personality.

“You didn’t call me because you wanted to help me feed the pigeons,” said Vern. “What’s on your mind?”

I told him what Tiny had told me over the phone. “So I’m going up there, check up on Seelye Smith, see if I can give Tiny a hand. Tiny wanted me to fill you in.”

“Tiny’s afraid of talking to his own brother?”

“I don’t think he wanted to bother you.”

“I’m half owner of the place. I’ve got a right to know what’s going on.”

I put my hand on his bony knee. “That’s why we’re here.”

He held the paper bag upside down and dumped what was left of the popcorn onto the pavement. Then he wadded up the bag and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He sighed, then turned to face me. “Goddamn Indians, anyways.”

Vern had a way of saying “goddamn” that betrayed his Skowhegan, Maine origins. It sounded like “gawd day-em” when he said it. I always suspected that he consciously cultivated the down-easterliness of his speech. In fact, it seemed to me that over the years I had known him he actually injected “ay-yuh” more and more often into his conversation—on the assumption, I figured, that the simple country-bumpkin facade gave him an edge over yuppies and other city types. He saw through people with the same clarity as an old Maine lobsterman, and he outsmarted them routinely.

During the Depression, Vern had paid for an engineering degree from MIT by guiding city sports on summer fishing expeditions up the Kennebec River and into the Allagash wilderness. He taught demolition during the war, on the government’s theory that a man who knew how to construct things would be the best man to tell others how to destroy them. Vern liked to say that the science of destruction was not much different from the art of creation, anyway.

After the war, he went back to Maine and bought into a small printing firm. By 1949 he owned it outright, and by 1957 he had amassed a tidy little fortune. He wet his forefinger, stuck it into the breeze, and Vern Wheeler saw the future—not plastics, as Dustin Hoffman was informed in the movie, but computers. And those computers would need programs to tell them what to do.

So Vern came to Boston and started up a firm that created and marketed educational software long before the machines to use it properly had been sufficiently refined. He understood what “programmed learning” promised, and he was able to envision the day when technology would catch up. When it did, Vern Wheeler was ready. By 1970 he had expanded, diversified, and opened corporate offices in strategic locations throughout the world.

He had also acquired ownership of at least one United States congressman—which, as he liked to say, “didn’t do a damn bit of harm.”

He also liked to say, “You can take the man out of Maine, but you can’t take Maine out of the man.” So as soon as he could afford it, Vern bought a run-down sporting camp and most of the acreage on the shores of Raven Lake, a crescent-shaped body of water tucked up in the northwest corner of the state. He gave his younger brother, Tiny, half interest in the place and hired him to run it.

Raven Lake Lodge was more than a business diversion and tax write-off for Vern. It was a place he loved. He refused to let Tiny open the place for business until two weeks after ice-out, normally in early May. Those first two weeks belonged to Vern and his friends, because that’s when the landlocked salmon fishing was best.

With Vern’s money and Tiny’s hard work, Raven Lake Lodge became one of the classiest—and most expensive—sporting camps in Maine. In the spring and summer, city sports could count on superior fishing for landlocked salmon, brook trout (which the natives called “square-tails”), lake trout (“togue”), and smallmouth bass. In September, hunters flocked to the place, hoping to kill a black bear. Come October, they could shoot partridge and woodcock over the points of Tiny’s kennel of English setters, and in November Raven Lake was a hot spot for whitetail deer.

It was, in fact, at Raven Lake in 1976 where I first met Vernon Wheeler. The ice had been out for three weeks, so the place had opened for official business. My friend Doc Adams, the master oral surgeon, had gotten wind of the fabulous salmon fishing there, and he had no trouble persuading me to take a week off to share it with him.

On the third day of our stay Doc claimed his arms were tired from hauling in so many large salmon, a complaint that I didn’t share, and he decided to test the trout fishing at Harley’s Creek for the day. I hadn’t had my fill of hauling in large salmon, so I found myself in a canoe with Woody, our Penobscot Indian guide, and a taciturn old guy who was known around the lodge only as “Vern.” I didn’t realize until later that he owned the place. It turned out to be one of those rare days when the salmon refused to bite, and although Vern and I flailed away with our fly rods until our arms ached, we returned to the lodge in the afternoon empty-handed. Doc resumed salmon fishing the next day, promising to show me how it was done, and I saw little of Vern during the rest of our stay.

But a couple of weeks later he called me at my office back in Boston. “This is Vernon Wheeler,” he said.

“Yes?” I answered, drawing a blank.

“You and I got skunked up on Raven Lake.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “How are you?”

“Been checking up on you. I like to check up on people. Especially on men who stick to the fly rod when the salmon aren’t biting. There’s usually something to be said for men like that.”

“You stuck to the fly rod, too.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “I spoke to an old friend of mine this morning. Florence Gresham.”

Florence Gresham had been my very first client. She was a flinty old Yankee lady who owned a mansion on the water in Beverly Farms, on Boston’s North Shore, and spent her summers in what she called her “cottage” in Bar Harbor, the swankiest part of Maine. “Florence is one of my favorite people,” I said.

I heard Wheeler chuckle. “That’s exactly what she said you’d say. Anyhow, you come well recommended. I need a man I can trust. I figured I could trust a man who’d stick to the fly rod. Florence assures me that while my body is decaying, my instincts remain acute.”

“What do you need me for?”

“Right now, nothing special. But things come up. I like to be prepared.”

“Well, I’m like you, Mr. Wheeler,” I said. “I like a man who sticks to the fly rod. I can also afford to be particular, and, like you, I always check out what my instincts suggest. So why don’t you leave me your number and I’ll get back to you.”

He chuckled again. “Florence said you’d say that, too. She’s waiting for your call.”

Florence Gresham’s recommendation was, for her, effusive. “Vernon Wheeler’s not half bad,” she told me. “Of course, I wouldn’t want to be married to the man.”

So Vern Wheeler joined my small but select group of clients. I fiddled with his will every year or so, advised him on matters that were usually more personal than legal, served as a sounding board for his opinions, checked on the reliability of some of the advice he received from his corporate attorneys, and let him buy me lunch at expensive Boston restaurants.

For this he paid me an outrageous retainer.

It seemed to be an arrangement that, all in all, we both found eminently satisfactory.

And several times after that he invited me and my friends up to Raven Lake right after ice-out, before the paying sports arrived. Doc Adams and Charlie McDevitt and I usually made a threesome of it. We caught lots of salmon on flies, which was worth more to me than the retainer.

Vern’s curse about the “goddamn Indians” reminded me of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot guides who worked at Raven Lake. “Tiny mentioned old Woody,” I said. “He’s the last of the Indian guides, isn’t he?”

“Yep. The rest’ve died or gone back to the city.” He looked down at the pigeons, which were still scratching around for bits of popcorn. “Hell, maybe it’s time to sell the place, anyways.”

“I don’t think Tiny wants to sell.”

Vern shrugged. “Tiny usually goes along with what I say. Raven Lake ain’t a big money-maker.”

“It’s Tiny’s life, Vern.”

He nodded. “Yes. That it is.” He sighed. “You’d think, in this land of the free, that a man wouldn’t have to sell anything he didn’t want to sell. But we’re talking about Maine, now, and Maine, as you know…”

“Is the home of the braves,” I finished for him. “An old line, Vern.”

He chuckled. “This any kind of a case, Brady?”

“I’ll know better when I talk to this Smith in Portland. On the one hand, the land settlement made by the feds some years ago says no, the Indians can make no more claims in Maine. On the other hand, the fact that this is sacred land we’re talking about may make Raven Lake an exception. Complicated.”

“Umm,” he grunted. “Indians got more lawyers working for them than squaws these days, and since that settlement, they’ve got more money to throw around than they know what to do with. They have discovered the joys of litigation.”

“It can be profitable,” I agreed. A pigeon pecked at my shoe. I shoved it away with a sideways swipe of my foot.

“Makes you wonder,” said Vern.

“What?”

“What the Indians really want with Raven Lake.”

I shrugged.

He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed himself into a standing position. He was a tall man, still straight and broad-shouldered in spite of his years. He peered down at me. “Hope you have good fishin’, Brady.”

I stood beside him. “There’s one thing I especially like about Raven Lake, even when the fish don’t bite.”

“What’s that?”

“No pigeons.”

I shook hands with Vern, and he wandered off through the gardens toward his office on Tremont Street, while I strolled back to my office in Copley Square via Boylston Street, plotting my trip to Raven Lake. I decided to bring my new Orvis four-weight boron rod as well as my old faithful Leonard split bamboo. I’d have to pick through my boxes of bucktails and streamers. Maybe tie up a few Grey Ghosts and Dark Edson Tigers and Warden’s Worries for the trip.

Of course, I still had to clear it with Julie. There was only one way to do it. I’d give her the same couple of weeks off, in addition to her regular vacation. A little bonus for her. A nonrefusable offer. Julie would call all our clients to tell them we’d be gone. That was the sort of small courtesy that set my practice apart. Then we’d put the “Gone Fishin’” sign on the door, call the answering service, and depart.

Julie was my secretary, my sole employee. In the actual practice of things, she was more like a partner. Hell, she really was more like my boss than the other way around. I once tried to bestow upon her the title of “Administrative Assistant.” I had been struggling to elevate my consciousness to the ever-increasing heights expected of an enlightened man in these days of sexual equality and liberated womanhood, and it never occurred to me that I might have committed another faux pas. Julie instantly set me straight.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a secretary,” she told me hotly. “You just have to keep in mind that secretaries do not brew and fetch coffee, buy birthday presents for ex-wives, sign and mail their employer’s Christmas cards, or stand in line for his Celtics tickets. So don’t you try to buy my goodwill with any phony new title. I am your secretary. It’s an important job. And don’t forget it.”

Indeed. Julie knows the business. She’s smart, efficient, imaginative, self-starting, self-reliant. She utterly charms all my clients. She is, in a word, all the things that I would like to be.

She also happens to be young and beautiful, which has not proved to be a serious hindrance to our working relationship.

As I sauntered along Boylston Street, sniffing the air and peering into the store windows, I tried to anticipate Julie’s reaction to my announcement that we would be closing the office for a week or two. She would tell me I was being irresponsible again. I would deftly parry her thrust by reminding her that I had to see Seelye Smith in Portland and that Tiny and Vern Wheeler, who were, after all, important clients, wanted me to hang around Raven Lake for a little while.